In the Western Balkans, issues linking trust and democracy acquire particular
importance and urgency in the wake of the Covid crisis. Based on a large-scale
public opinion poll carried out in the six countries of the Western Balkans,
this brief shows that the pandemic has exacerbated the region’s issues with
trust in public institutions even further. The study finds that the reticence of
publics to undergo vaccination is directly linked with mistrust in governments,
corroborating earlier research by BiEPAG that warned about the wide diffusion
of coronavirus-related conspiracy theories in the region and their relation with
vaccine scepticism. The brief also points to the profiling of a trend termed
‘authoritarian production of trust’ in the largest country of the region, Serbia.
Yet, it also identifies a ‘constituency of change’ with similar characteristics
across the region: a picture that opens space to invest trust in new actors able to
advance genuine progressive causes in South East Europe, beyond and instead
of captured institutions and the respective party establishments.
